So you planted a tree — perhaps a few trees — this spring. The first years those trees are in the ground, while permanent limbs are developing, are going to be important to their future strength and beauty. Pruning is one way to direct development, and the best time for this is when trees are small. Small cuts made on small trees leave correspondingly small wounds.
Dawn redwood
For starters, help your young tree to develop a sturdy trunk. For most trees, Read more
People tend to be too tolerant of their fruit trees, accepting them even if they bear poor or no fruit. Perhaps it’s the snowball of blossoms in spring that makes a lack of edible fruit later in the season acceptable. Of course, if a tree is young and not yet of flowering age, the barren plant can be forgiven. But pinpointing the reason why your tree is barren is the first step to reaping both visual and gustatory pleasures.
Lack of cross-pollination, that is, pollen from a different variety of the same kind of fruit, could be the problem.
Apricot orchard in bloom
You wouldn’t eat as much pie as you would bread, would you? So don’t ever feed your plants without considering how rich their food — fertilizer — is. Urea, for example, is the plant food equivalent of a chocolate bar, a very rich food, rich enough so that a whole cup could kill a rose bush. Near the other extreme might be bone meal, the unbuttered popcorn of fertilizers, providing nourishment but nothing to get fat on.
A well-nourished garden because . . .
The following is adapted from my book, The Ever Curious Gardener: Using a Little Natural Science for a Lot Better Garden, available from the usual outlets or, signed, from me (www.leereich.com/books).
Imagine that you hadn’t set foot outside all spring… better yet, that you had spent all spring in a warmed cave . . . then tomorrow you went out and stayed there. At the very least, you would have to put your hands to your eyes for a while to shield them from the sun. And if the night was very cool — not unusual this time of year — well, you would shiver. Fresh air and sunlight are great for the constitution, but you would have to first acclimate yourself to them.
The same goes, even more so, for vegetable and flower transplants. Indoors, where they get their start, they are, after all, coddled. Read more
The following is adapted from my book The Ever Curious Gardener: Using a Little Natural Science for a Much Better Garden:
You often hear talk about various plants being related to each other. There’s the sunny-faced members of the Daisy Family, for example, and the Pea Family, all with pods. Cole crops, such as cabbage, broccoli, and kale, are close kin, all in the same genus and species. What characteristics link these groups of plants as relatives?
Yes, goldenrod is in the Daisy Family!
Before you blurt out that all daisies have petal-rimmed flowers typified by sunflower and aster, picture the flowers of goldenrod, also a member of this family. And although all cole crops have waxy, bluish green leaves, just look how the plants vary in form. We eat the stalk of kohlrabi, the leaves of cabbage, and the flower buds of broccoli. Read more
If delayed gratification sometimes seems to be too much a part of gardening, it does teach us to appreciate the means to an end as much as the end itself. Especially with planting trees. Your vision might call for a towering maple or spreading beech in a corner of your front yard, but you can do no more than plant one, care for it, and wait.
Not that full-sized trees cannot be — and sometimes are — moved for instant effect. Read more
I hope that I’ve caught you in time, before your seedlings have stretched out too long and too thin. That’s a problem this time of year. Tomato, zinnia, and broccoli plants — they’re all growing up on sunny windowsills. It’s the combination of a bit too much warmth and a bit too little light that causes that stretching.
The easiest way around this problem would be to just wait until the weather warmed up enough to sow seeds directly outside. There, abundant sunlight, cooler temperatures, and buffeting by wind would make sturdy, stocky seedlings. Of course, do this and you won’t eat your first broccoli bud until the end of June, and you’ll have to wait until early September to admire your first zinnia flower or bite into your first tomato.
Read more
People often stare at me in disbelief if I suggest buying a certain plant from a nursery 2000 or 3000 miles away. Surely no plant could survive such a journey!
Not so. This time of year, UPS trucks and airplane holds are filled with plants on the move.
I prefer to buy my plants at local nurseries. But when I want a specific plant, such as a Hudson’s Golden Gem apple tree on G.11 dwarfing rootstock, I have to turn to mail order. (In this case, it would be from www.cumminsnursery.com.)
If shipped from reputable nurseries, mail-order plants thrive as Read more
An ideal time to prune most trees and shrubs is just as their buds are swelling, which is just about now here on my farmden. Leafless stems make it easy to see where to cut, dead stems make their presence known, and with coldest weather past chances for cold damage near cuts are minimized. Warmer spring weather also promotes rapid healing of cuts.
Whole books have been written about pruning (I even wrote one!: THE PRUNING BOOK), yet the essence of pruning can be distilled into a few general pointers. The ten listed below will not result in an expert pruning job, but offer sufficient guidance to keep you and your plants reasonably happy.
1. Don’t cut unless you have a clear reason to do so. Trees and shrubs vary in their needs for pruning, from, for example, Japanese maple and witch hazel, which need no regular pruning, to butterfly bush and lilac, which need to be pruned every year to look their best.
Japanese maple’s rarely need pruning
This time of year, a slice of Key lime pie is the next best thing to walking along a beach in the Florida Keys. Okay, not the next best thing, but good eating anyway. Hold on a minute, though, before beginning your gustatory journey; the supermarket is not the place to begin.
What you are most likely to get at any market is a Persian lime (Citrus × latifolia), a hybrid of Key lime and lemon), and this kind of lime lacks the unique and potent aroma of a genuine Key lime (Citrus × aurantiifolia). Persian lime is more cold-hardy and less seedy than Key lime, and has a longer shelf life. Even commercial lime pies are sometimes made with Persian limes, one reason why a pie from a bakery or a slice in a restaurant might miss the mark in flavor.
Bonsai Key lime tree
You probably now suspect — and rightly so — that I’m going to suggest that you grow your own Key limes. Do it, but watch out Read more
